1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a semiconductor memory card that protects the copyright to a content, and a recording apparatus, a recording and reproducing apparatus, and the sales method for the semiconductor memory card.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, distribution of pay contents on the Internet (in other words, the EC (Electronic Commerce)) has become increasingly popular and more and more pay contents are provided on the Internet. In the EC on the Internet generally, a consumer accesses a homepage set up by the information provider and searches for contents he/she likes. Once the consumer finds contents of his/her choice, the consumer sends to the information provider a user ID and a credit card number, along with a request for purchasing the contents. Then, the consumer can download the contents.
Since contents handled in the EC are digital data that hardly deteriorates, the contents can maintain high quality. Recent developments in compression technologies for digital data have also enabled distribution of various data (contents) such as music and video data via the Internet. MP3 (Moving Picture Experts Group1 Audio Layer3) is one of the compression technologies for audio data. With MP3, music data on a CD can be compressed to one tenth of the original volume, with almost no deterioration in the quality. A user can obtain a free MP3 encoder and decoder for PC on the Internet. A user can create MP3 format data by encoding music data on a CD, and redistribute the music data via a network. Accordingly, it has become difficult to protect the copyright to music data against such uses.
Taking this problem seriously, the music industry has created an organization called SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) to establish a system by which copyright can be protected in distribution of music data via the network. According to the SDMI rules, once electronic music contents obtained via the Internet are stored in a recording medium, the contents should not be moved to another medium unless protection of their copyrights are guaranteed.
To achieve this goal, the SDMI has chosen a system in which a unique ID is given to each recording medium, and contents to be stored in a recording medium are encrypted using the ID unique to the recording medium. Accordingly, even if the encrypted contents are moved or copied to another recording medium, the contents cannot be reproduced because the ID used in encrypting the contents does not coincide with the ID of the recording medium. In this manner, copyright protection is guaranteed.
Now, there are audio players that correspond to the copyright protection system that utilizes IDs unique to recording media.
Such audio players are generally packaged with recording media and are sold to consumers. Conventionally, nothing is recorded in the recording media at the time of shipment. Therefore, before enjoying contents, a consumer who purchased an audio player has to obtain the contents via the Internet and store the contents in the recording medium.